1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to the field of data processing systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to the field of implementing data processing systems in a logical partitioning environment. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for supporting debugging of host channel adapters in a logical partitioning environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
InfiniBand was originally envisioned as a comprehensive “System Area Network” that would connect CPUs and provide all high speed I/O for “back-office” applications. In this role it would potentially replace just about every datacenter I/O standard including peripheral component interconnect (PCI) and various networks like Ethernet. Instead, all of the CPUs and peripherals would be connected into a single pan-datacenter switched InfiniBand fabric. This vision offered a number of advantages in addition to greater speed, not the least of which is that I/O workload would be largely lifted from computer and storage. In theory, this should make the construction of clusters much easier, and potentially less expensive, because more devices could be shared and they could be easily moved around as workloads shifted. Proponents of a less comprehensive vision saw InfiniBand as a pervasive, low latency, high bandwidth, low overhead interconnect for commercial datacenters, albeit one that might perhaps only connect servers and storage to each other, while leaving more local connections to other protocols and standards such as PCI.
A host channel adapter (HCA) provides a computer system with a port connection with other InfiniBand devices. The port may be coupled to another HCA, a target device, or an InfiniBand switch fabric that redirects data among the components of the computer system.
A HCA adapter includes resources and controls that affect the adapter as whole and a pool of resources with their corresponding controls that can be allocated to different operating system (OS) images in a logical partitioning environment. One of the adapter-wide resources offered is a facility to generate traces. Since the adapter may be shared by more than one OS image, only the hypervisor is allowed access and control over the adapter's trace facility. Therefore, there is a need for a system and method for presenting the adapter's tracing capabilities to an OS image for debug support.